As I did during this time last year, the following are a series of posts regarding possibly less
heralded/recognized musicians and artists who died in 2021 who will be sorely
missed.
Cabaret Voltaire came together in the early 1970s, when Sheffield, England resident Chris Watson, an admirer of Brian Eno's early work, began experimenting with his own self-made electronic music gizmos. His early noodlings caught the attention of fellow Sheffieldite and Eno devotee Kirk, and the two began working together making sound collage tape loops. Kirk began adding traditional instruments into the mix, and late in 1973 enlisted his friend Stephen Mallinder to add vocals and bass guitar. The band began appearing live at venues in the central UK in the spring of 1975, but these performances leaned more towards performance art than actual concerts. Their provocative stage antics led to some highly raucous and violent incidents in those early days (with injuries incurred by both audience and band members), but with the rise of punk rock in the late '70s, audiences became more accepting of what Cabaret Voltaire had to offer. By the end of that decade, the group was sharing bills with the likes of Joy Division and Gang Of Four. Their debut album, Mix-Up, was released in 1979, the first of over a dozen LPs put out during the band's initial run (they broke up in 1994, only to reform in 2014. albeit with Kirk as the sole remaining member).
I didn't know anything about Cabaret Voltaire until the mid-80s, during my senior (First Class) year at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD. That year, an underclassman nicknamed "Rock" moved into my company. Rock was the antithesis of what the standard template for a military officer was or should be - he was tall, gaunt and geeky, in a young Ric Ocasek-sort of way. And he had both a biting wit and a semi-rebellious attitude, features that did not serve him well with the Academy leadership and hierarchy.
But he had superb musical tastes, and he and I began bonding over our shared enjoyment of bands considered to be outside of the popular mainstream. Rock turned me on to groups like Pere Ubu and Bauhaus with its various offshoots (like Tones On Tail and Love & Rockets). And he was the one who introduced me to Cabaret Voltaire, playing "Crackdown" from the album of the same name for me one weekend afternoon. But even with exposures to that album and songs like "James Brown" and "Sensoria" from their next disc Micro-Phonies, I can't say that I was a huge CV fan until after I graduated and moved to Athens, Georgia for a few months. As I've mentioned before, mid/late-80s Athens was a musical hotbed, and the University of Georgia's student-run radio station, WUOG, was amazing, always playing interesting stuff. And one day they spun the song "I Want You", off of the group's latest disc The Covenant, The Sword, And The Arm Of The Lord:
That was the tune that hooked me, and I immediately ran out to purchase the album.
The Covenant, The Sword, And The Arm Of The Lord was one of Cabaret Voltaire's most contentious and controversial albums. From Wikipedia:
"Cabaret Voltaire struggled with several censorship issues with Some Bizarre and Virgin Records upon the release of the album. The original title... was forced to be shortened [to The Arm Of The Lord] in the US to avoid reference to a former American white supremacist organization. Musically, the album featured a more abrasive, sample-heavy sound than its predecessor and contained many sexual innuendos in the lyrics, to which Virgin Records took objection. Several speeches by Charles Manson were also mixed in between songs."
Virgin laid down the law to the band, saying that there had to be a charting single released from this album, otherwise they would be dropped from the label. In response, Cabaret Voltaire cheekily wrote and directed the above video for the brutal "I Want You" (they later admitted the song was about masturbation). Shockingly, the move worked - the album made the British Top 60, calming the label's fears (the band still left Virgin for EMI for their next album in 1987).
Long before the original band's first dissolution, Kirk had begun releasing solo albums, the first of which being 1980's Disposable Half-Truths. He released six more solo LPs prior to the breakup, then significantly increased his output in the 1990s, with releases and collaborations under his own name and scores of aliases (including Sandoz, DR Xavier, Biochemical Dread, Electronic Eye Dark Magus and Wicky Wacky) dabbling in not only the industrial, but the techno/dance genre as well. Not only was he a pioneer, but he was prolific, and will be sorely missed.
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